jazz

May Music Find a Way. Spring 2022 Parlando Top Ten numbers 7-5

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Tonight is Jazz Night here at the Parlando Project Top 10 countdown. I’m going to ask the folks who come here for the talk about words to murmur down quietly today as I speak about the music.

Funny how these quarterly counts sometimes become nice little “sets.” Both today and tomorrow’s segments as we countdown to the most popular piece this past spring are as good as any planned ones I could have devised. So, let’s get the musicians on stage!

7. Sonny Rollins, the Bridge, 1959 by Frank Hudson.  Remember that the bold-face headings at the start of each entry in this countdown are links to the original post presenting them, where you can read what I had to say about it then. I had a lot to say about this one back in January, and so even though this is a piece where I wrote both the words and music, today I’m going to talk about how this (and many of our Parlando Project musical pieces) was realized.

With significant accuracy I hesitate to call myself a musician. My home instrument is the guitar, but even there my knowledge is not something to brag about, my skillset a bit unusual, but limited, and my consistency not up to a professional (or even many dedicated amateurs’) level. But I have a secret weapon: I can choose to compose or improvise (spontaneous composition) the things I present here. My Jazz guitar chops are not strong, but the chordal part was something I was able to execute. Listening back today to the second guitar part I improvised for this I think it was a good day with the wind at my back for me.

In another world I’d more often use other musicians who could add their skills to this enterprise, but logistically and financially the one-man-band approach is what makes it possible for me to express the variety of different musical ideas that I present.

To hear this or the other musical pieces here, use the player that may appear below, or this highlighted link.

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6. Lenox Ave Midnight, an Extension by Langston Hughes.  Another little miracle pulled from my limited, if a bit unusual, skill set? On a good day I can do a passible impression of a guitarist, but my keyboard playing is always naïve. The advantage I can find? Modern MIDI lets me use my mind where my fingers don’t know what to do. In a piece like this I figure out some kind of harmonic flavor by trial and error and my sketchy knowledge of music theory. I played that part and then improvised a right-hand part, editing on a MIDI “piano roll” to correct bad dynamics or altering notes I didn’t like. To an actual pianist this could be called “cheating.” To a composer, it’s called “composing.” You see, I use the term composer protectively, because I really do feel ashamed sometimes that I couldn’t play in real time with two hands the keyboard parts that to casual listeners make a sound like I could. And I think: to a real pianist realizing this simple composition would be a trifle. To me: achievement!

Near the end of this piece, to open up its musical world before I speak the two lines I added to Langston Hughes poem (the reason I call this piece “an extension”) I did something I rarely do here, which I personally try to avoid, because it really does feel like cheating to me. I used a couple of small loops of recorded melodic material from Apple Logic’s free-to-use loop library. My composer’s need here was that my simple and not very convincing saxophone part, that I did play on MIDI guitar, needed something to camouflage those issues.

Why does this bother me to do? After all sampled loops have been part of popular music since the hip-hop DJ’s started dropping riffs from vinyl records. Because I use “composer” as my excuse, my get-out-of-pretender-jail free card, I believe I (or at least some human present in the room with me in the creation process) should have played or scored the notes. I think the two short horn section loops used here sound fine, helped make this piece successful for listeners — but that’s why I feel guilty for using that tactic. Whoever played them, devised those short motifs, didn’t know what I was doing, wasn’t working in concert with my aims.

Now look, I don’t generally mind when other artists do this. Returning to words briefly now: I spent many an April here performing the words of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”  which includes — even more than I imagined — squadrons of quotations and paraphrases from pre-existing works. Selection, curation, recombination, and recontextualization are easily defined as creative acts. Maybe my qualms and self-imposed rules in this have a most self-interested reason: I worry that the casual listener here will think I’m just reading poems over pre-recorded music, when I’m proud that I had to write and play and record the majority of the music on this Project, one track at a time.

Player below, or link.

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Sonny Rollins, inspiring to me, yet my distance from that discipline shames me

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5. Autumn Movement by Carl Sandburg.  I stopped writing this post here yesterday, because what I had written so far seemed embarrassingly solipsistic, pretentious, and uninteresting to my audience, and yet also because some of the things I’m feeling as I write about my musical work are hard to condense into a reasonable length post — to be better, it would be even more. And so here we are at this, my presentation of a short nature poem by one of my heroes Carl Sandburg, illuminated by lovely music I made for it. How am I to feel about it tonight? Amazed that I, a non-musician, was able to make it? Or something that feels almost like shame or embarrassment that I present it publicly, when there are days I can’t play anything of any value? Knowing enough to know that what I know as a composer (little) and what I can bring to the composer as a player (limited). Knowing that at my age (old) there isn’t much lifetime to remedy those things.

This, though I cannot say I have sufficient understanding or skills, is where Jazz comforts me as no other art does. Jazz is always confronting the empty sky. Always a critique of silence — and able to the fears inside silence, now, not later, and with surprise and failure. There can be no surprise without failure. I’m a small man, it’s a big sky and a big silence. There are better musicians, better composers, but it’s a big sky and a big silence. This the musician’s and composer’s prayer: may music find a way.

Player below, or link.

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Thoughts on Juneteenth: Jazz was born free, and everywhere is exchanged

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I have no new musical piece for today’s American celebration of freedom’s restoration, Juneteenth. I made moves toward one, but things didn’t move fast enough. In my wayward search I’ve been spending more time thinking about the Mid-20th century period 1940-65 that I wrote about a few posts back. During that period the Afro-American art form Jazz moved from being a predominant popular music style (though often performed by non-Afro-American musicians) to a multi-valent art music that intelligently reflected young Black artists, their concerns, and their adaptations.

That transformation is a complex thing, and this’ll be a short post. Early this century Ken Burns’ Jazz  made the simplified case that this was a tragic arc.  Art-music is something a smaller portion of people listen to, live with, care about. I don’t buy that singular tragic summary any more than I buy the companion theory held by others that the audience’s advancing stupidity is to be blamed instead. I suspect these theories are subject to the downhill-to-hell-in-a-handbasket generational syndrome that is ever repeated throughout time. Not that there aren’t things worth observing, worth reviving attention to, worth taking back out of the toolbox for reuse in these sorts of reverence for the past! After all, I’ve spent a good deal of time in this project drawing attention to and finding worth in early 20th century Modernist poetry. So, moldy figs, check.

I’ve spent a good deal of time this month listening to mid-century Black American Jazz, some of it from the end of that mid-century quarter when “free jazz” was the new thing. It’s not everyone’s cup of expresso-in-a-small-club. In Burns’ Jazz,  several of the talking critics had it that these were the vandals that sacked Rome. Last night at dinner I tried to explain Albert Ayler to my spouse, who loves me enough to forgive that.*  Want a simple blurb from me now on Ayler? Most people will be unable to listen to many of Ayler’s recordings with pleasure without significantly understanding something of its intent and context. There’s an argument to be made that art should never resort to that. My belief: sometimes one needs to be baffled, needs to ask questions on the parade from ear to heart. In the Jazz  documentary, Stanley Crouch (the initial G is silent) would say of a player like Ayler “the emperor has no clothes.”  I’d say he’s stripped naked.

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Mid-Century was also an era when LP liner notes could be saying something. Here’s a bit written by Steve Young on 1965’s Black Arts/Free Jazz live album “The New Wave In Jazz.” I’m unable to find anything about what happened to this Steve Young.

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So, it was Free Jazz in my ear as I approach this month’s American’s celebration of the restoration of freedom. Soon it’ll be American Independence Day. We Americans abundantly like the word freedom. Conceptually freedom is inherently a broad thing. People tore into the Capital crying freedom from votes they wished to disenfranchise. People were beaten on the Pettus bridge crying freedom to cast votes.

So, Freedom’s a broad thing. Freedom is like the meaning of life, self-evident and elusive. I think it’s to find your joy and to help others.

Here is today’s returning meeting of my original music and someone’s poetry, from one of the too-overlooked Afro-American artists of the last decade that was called The Twenties: Gwendolyn Bennett. She just called it “Song,”  as broad a title as freedom for a complex thing that is Black American music. You can play it with the player below if you see that, or with this highlighted link.

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*I told her I’d just spent the day reading LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and listening to free jazz from 1965. Poetry and 50-plus-years-ago free-jazz combined will interest a few people, less perhaps than even the small crowd for either of those things by themselves — that’s you folks reading this far — and she’d just spent her day helping sick people. Sing heavenly muses: that I clearly have a higher calling.

Completing my National Poetry Month daily posting with two beautiful pieces

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

It’s been quite the job of work to do daily posts with new lyric videos here this April in celebration of National Poetry Month, and I haven’t taken the time yet to see what impact those extra efforts have had. Though I was re-releasing already recorded audio pieces from the earliest years of this six-year Project this month, even the fairly simple lyric videos took more time than you might think — and then there was the selection of which pieces to present, as well as writing a few hundred words on what I currently thought of each of them.

Well, not only is today the last day of National Poetry Month, it’s International Jazz Day, and I felt I needed to make a nod to that today. So, let’s play two!

The first piece is, I think, one of the prettiest of the more than 600 performances we’ve presented: Carl Sandburg’s “Autumn Movement.”   Sandburg gets tagged as an urban poet, and of course he broke into the scene with Chicago Poems in 1914. But he grew up in a more downstate Illinois town, and traveled around the less urban areas of the country before spending the majority of his “now you’re famous” years on a small goat farm. “Autumn Movement”  is from his 1918 Cornhuskers collection, which as you might expect from its title is not all city living.*

Here’s Sandburg with farmland not skyscrapers

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While “Autumn Movement”  is short in word-count, I did get to playing a bit as I tried my best to approximate in this piece the stylings of Bill Frisell with my Telecaster and fretless bass. Frisell, who can play more contexts more better than I can properly imagine, is usually labeled a Jazz guitarist. I’m not, labels or otherwise. I just have a lot of guts — but the result is  pretty.

As per our April thing, you have three ways to hear “Autumn Movement.”  You can use the player gadget just below. No gadget?  This highlighted hyperlink will do it too. And the lyric video is above.


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And the bonus second piece? “Sonny Rollins, The Bridge, 1959”  is not an early performance (I performed and presented it earlier this year) but for International Jazz Day I thought it’d be good to have another piece that not only uses Jazz musical flavorings but actually deals with being a Jazz artist — or by easy extension, an American artist in any medium. If I’m not a proper Jazz composer or musician, I take great strength just from considering their achievements, their dedication, their originality. Given that most of the giants are Afro-Americans who’ve had a whole ‘nother level of obstacles and expectations to get over as serious artists — well, the mind boggles and the heart swells considering them.

And one more chorus: three ways to hear it: the graphical player just below this, the backup highlighted hyperlink, and the lyric video just a bit lower down on the page.

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I hope this experiment has been enjoyable for the regulars here who may have joined the Parlando Project already in progress and who perhaps haven’t heard the earlier pieces — and it was my hope that it would also bring some new readers and listeners into the fold. If you’re one of those: welcome! I’m not predictable in what kind of poetry or music I’ll use, but I do consistently try to keep it interesting and varied, and I’d sure like to have you come along with me as I do that.

And here’s my ode to the inspiring Sonny Rollins in lyric video form

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*I’ve always enjoyed the story of Bob Dylan seeking out Sandburg as the younger singer was just starting to reach a level of national fame in 1964. While trying to locate Sandburg, Dylan was unable to get the locals to recognize a “Sandburg the poet” he was seeking, but then they asked back if he was looking instead for “Sandburg the goat farmer.”

Robert Frost wrote a lot of poems about rural life, including many of his best and best remembered, but his contemporary Sandburg, Mr. City of the Big Shoulders, probably spent more time around actual farms and farming.

Her Lips are Copper Wire for National Poetry Month

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Even with its most popular and well-known poems, poetry works, works its impact, one reader, one listener, at a time.

Doing this project leads me to read a lot of poems. I’ll go through whole collections, entire anthologies, looking for things that I suspect I can create music for. That sense, “This could work with music” is hard to quantify. I’ve noticed repetition and refrain will often cause a second look. Longer poems will need to presently suggest selections as I’m seeking sub-5-minute pieces. Yes, graceful lines that sing on the page for whatever reason will suggest music. An image or an incident vividly depicted that grabs me will ask me to stop and consider it. Oh, I don’t really know, can’t say for sure, how I select things for this. I’m happy with it being a mystery, and I hope you, reader/listener are too.

Sometimes that attraction is strong though. The moment I finished my first reading of Jean Toomer’s “Her Lips are Copper Wire”  I knew I had to write music for it and do my best to realize it in performance. Perhaps I can’t say why that is. Little matter. The pull, the attraction, was undeniable.

This Surrealist love poem, like E. E. Cummings poem from last time, was written before the first Surrealist Manifesto, and is proof Americans could use English in this mode early in the Modernist era. Long time readers here will know I sometimes like to mesh in Blues and Jazz flavors with my music,* but Toomer, an early Afro-American Modernist, seemed to have already suggested that with this poem, so that I didn’t have to underline the point. I suppose it just strongly communicated the wonder of desire to me.

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This poem was placed into Toomer’s Modernist masterpiece, the book-length mixed-form “Cane.”

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It’s National Poetry Month, the reason I’m going through early Parlando Project pieces to present a more rapid posting schedule here this April. NPM tries to increase interest in poetry, but it’s hard to get a read on how significantly it achieves that. Arrayed against it is every poem someone didn’t “get” for whatever reason. Every poem that says only “Care about what I’m saying, even though you won’t understand,” poems without the bridge to “Here’s how you connect to this.” Every poem that bores us keeps us from poetry, and we are so easily bored. How many poems does it take to put up a wall against poetry, and will putting a poster on that wall dissolve the wall?

Is this the fault of the poets, their poetry? Is that the fault of us, the readers/listeners? Are there social structures that surpass us in enforcing this distance from the art?  That’s a mystery. I don’t know the answer. But I know that once in awhile I come upon a poem like “Her Lips are Copper Wire,”  and like another Surrealist love poet Paul Éluard I’m left compelled “to speak without having anything to say” — anything to say other than the words of this poem. That limerent pleasure is likely why you’re here, reading this, and listening to the performance of Toomer’s poem. Thanks to that mystery and you.

No lyric video today, but you can hear my performance of Jean Toomer’s poem with a player gadget below. Don’t see that? Well, this highlighted link will also do the job.

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*I’ll bring that musical influence to any text, breaking out Delta slide for T. S. Eliot, turning German Dada verse and Robert Frost into blues stanzas — and anachronistically seeing Emily Dickinson as a scratchy blues 78 record, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at a beatnik Jazz café.

Soul Selector Blues for National Poetry Month

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Just suppose that back in the 1920s someone wanted to record a Blues song based on Emily Dickinson’s “A Soul selects her own Society,”  and so they waxed a 78 rpm platter at Paramount records “New York Recording Laboratories,” located back then in, well, Wisconsin.*

If they did, it might sound a little like this.

We offer this sort of nonsense as part of our celebration of National Poetry Month. Then again, maybe it’s not nonsense. Dickinson’s poem does fit into “Old Weird America” and its music shockingly well. Why’s that?

As best as can be determined, Dickinson wrote “A Soul selects her own Society”  during her highly-productive mid-19th century, but for a variety of reasons, this poem, like almost all the other poems that she wrote, wasn’t published until near the end of that century. Somewhat “regularized,” Dickinson’s poetry was bound then into book-length collections that sold well for poetry by an otherwise unknown author, partly due to the myth of her eccentric later-life used as hype for the verse, and because some of her poetry was disarmingly informal and approachable — at least on the surface.

Literary poetry gradually began to take notice of her. I presented Sandburg’s audacious mention of her in 1914 as an “Imagist” earlier this month, and over the course of the 20th century her work has eventually been judged as important as Whitman’s in presaging 20th century Modernism. Now, I daresay that if one was to survey living poets in 21st century America for what 19th century American poet they read, admire, and use as an influence, Dickinson would beat out Whitman — and those two would leave the rest of the field far arrears.

What else happened around the beginning of the 20th century, but took serious critics and culture a while to notice? Afro-American secular music — Blues and Jazz — which would come to significantly define American music internationally and become the dominant strain of our country’s music ever since. Americans were highly important in English language poetic Modernism.** Afro-Americans had their Modernist revolution to offer too, and a great deal was musical in this era.***

So, in another way, this unlikely pairing of Dickinson and Blues isn’t as odd as it seems.

Paramount’s “race records” ads scattered in this video, like other white-owned firms marketing to Black listeners, ran often in Black publications like the Chicago Defender. Outside of these ads, the Defender of the ‘20s largely ignored Blues as problematic. From examples I’ve seen the Paramount ads were less stereotyped than other “race records” companies’. Paramount did hire a Black consultant, Mayo Williams, who may be partly responsible for that.

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Three ways to hear this performance of speculative fiction: a graphical player is below for a portion of you, but if your way of reading this blog doesn’t show that, this highlighted link will also do the job.  And the new lyric videos we’re doing this month is the third way to hear “Soul Selector Blues.”   Oh — it’s not your speakers or computer — it’s supposed to sound like a Paramount 78 RPM record!

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*Port Washington Wisconsin to be exact. I’m not entirely sure why Paramount Records wanted to make it sound like it was in New York, perhaps for prestige, and despite the name they had no connection with the motion picture company Paramount either. What was a record company doing in Wisconsin anyway? Well, they made furniture (the upper Midwest was a timber source) and that led them to make cabinets for the new entertainment device, the phonograph. And if they made phonographs, why not seek another income stream from the “software,” the disks to be played on them?

If you choose to view today’s lyric video you’ll see a sampling of how they marketed to Black Americans variously (I can hear the meeting: “Who really knows what they like and will buy…”). High culture to gut-bucket, spirituals to sexual rebels (Ma Rainey’s “Prove It On Me” is about exactly what the illustration on its Paramount ad might lead you to think it was about). They had a pitch for your money and ears.

**Curiously, almost exactly 50 years before the “English Invasion” brought British rock’n’roll bands to the U.S., a small but influential group of Americans were over in England evangelizing poetic Modernism. Were The Beatles payback for Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot?

***Even literary minded Afro-American writers, critics, and poets weren’t necessarily ahead of the curve in seeing Jazz music and Blues lyrics as an authentic Modernist revitalization of tired-out existing tropes at first. Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg were exceptions a century ago in seeing this.

Winter 2020-21 Parlando Top Ten (abbreviated edition)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Given the everything I’d rate between losses, troubles, and mere distractions I’ve gone through since late last autumn, I’m not in a mood this week to do the traditional Parlando Top Ten list for the past season. These are the same issues in repertory that have reduced the number of new pieces I was able to present here during that time. You, the audience for this Project, have stayed with this: readership to this blog is growing, overall listenership to the audio pieces is slightly up. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. There’s more than three of you — I mean to thank all of you three times.

I know some of you do like these quarterly Top Tens, and I enjoy them myself — if only just to see what pieces from the variety presented here got the most response. That said, let’s rush through the numbers 10 up to 6 for the record:

10. Song to the Dark Virgin by Langston Hughes

9. Winter Solstice Consolations by Frank Hudson

8. I died for Beauty —  but was scarce by Emily Dickinson

7. Oh, Maria by Ethna McKiernan

6. Letting Go the Wolves by Ethna McKiernan

You can see in those five pieces two from my memorial observance for the Irish-American poet McKiernan who I had the privilege to know and examine poetry with, and one from my February Black History Month celebration of Langston Hughes’ first poetry collection The Weary Blues.  There in the middle, there’s one by long-time Parlando Project favorite Emily Dickinson. And my own piece in that group talks about the loss of Ethna and also my March memorial subject who Dave Moore and I also knew and worked with: Kevin FitzPatrick. If you missed any of these, each of that above list is a link to my original blog posting and the audio performance of it, just as the following ones bolded titles are.

We join the countdown to the most listened to and liked piece then at number 5.

Tommy Thaw card 800

Spring, a rebuttal.

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5. Velvet Shoes by Elinor Wylie. A lovely, graceful winter poem by a too-often-overlooked poet from “The Last Twenties” in our previous century. I like the music and performance I created for this one just as much as I did when I created it back around the beginning of 2022.

One would think I’d be through with snow experiences this far into spring, but my morning bike ride today was in big wet flakes and a cold enough north wind. Wylie’s velvet snow is more the dry January sort, but then appreciating snow for its beauty qualities may be best done in past-tense. If so, you may enjoy listening to this one in what I hope is a pleasant spring.

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4. Lenox Avenue: Midnight by Langston Hughes. “The rhythm of life is a Jazz rhythm” says the first line of Hughes’ poem. I did my best to honor that injunction from one of the first Afro-American poets to unabashedly celebrate that musical form. Although I’m a vary unskilled keyboard player I was able to compose a satisfying two-handed part using MIDI as a scoring tool. I wanted a saxophone solo too, which you can hear a bit of in this performance, but I just couldn’t score or execute enough articulation to “make it.” The piece’s final horn section flourish is one of my rare surrenders to using a sampled musical phrase.

Of course, motif sampling is now an oft honored tactic in the ongoing Afro-American musical tradition, so perhaps I shouldn’t view it as a failure on my part. On the audacity front: I decided to extend Hughes’ lyric which ended with “And the Gods are laughing at us” with a newly written affirmation from after the poem’s time of 1926, one that says that the young art of Jazz and of young writer Langston Hughes’ has answered those gods.

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3. Sonny Rollins, The Bridge 1959. Staying with Jazz for this one, though with my own words straight through. There are beliefs — some sincere, some insincere — that Afro-American history is but a sorrowful tale, a grievance and a pandering response. If you can heartily do so, I ask you to improvise your own expletive response to the call of that fearful theory, one with as much eloquence and melodic force as you can deliver. Now our response may not be Sonny Rollins level improvisation. That’s not a reason not to — after all, Sonny Rollins wasn’t sure his improvisations were Sonny Rollins’ level improvisations. That’s the story in this piece.

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2. After Apple Picking by Robert Frost. I made my pitch that Robert Frost was verging on being a bluesman elsewhere this winter, but that piece didn’t make the Top Ten as this one did. His Black American contemporary Langston Hughes called his first book and a featured poem in it The Weary Blues,  but this poem of Frost’s could have that name too. Both Hughes’ Weary Blues and Frost’s end in sleep.

I seem to lack the concentration, or the assured concentration of blocks of time, to do arrangements as full as the one I created for Frost’s poem right now. But you can still enjoy this one.

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1. Stones by Ethna McKiernan. One answer to lack of compositional time is to write solo instrument pieces, which for me usually means acoustic guitar. Of the several pieces I did to introduce more of you to McKiernan’s range of poetry, this was the one that by far got the most listens this winter — in fact, more listens than any piece has received for more than a year during its first season after posting.

Before I leave you to listen to it, I want to say that beyond soothing my grief at Ethna’s death, that performing those pieces which used her words this winter made her seem closer than our too casual life connection sometimes had us. Wherever we voyage, the same waves lap the same sounds on the walls of our boats.

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Lenox Avenue: Midnight, an extension

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Here’s another early Langston Hughes poem from The Weary Blues,  his collection which I’ve chosen to focus on during this Black History Month. Given Hughes’ esteemed position as part of the Harlem Renaissance and the long career that followed, it may be hard to remember that this is a poem by a young man, less than 25 years old. Of course, as I reminded myself as I tried to write the best poetry I could as a young person: famous British poet John Keats died at 25 — so there’s no reason for our Afro-American poet to wait to write either.*

Though it was Langston Hughes’ first book, The Weary Blues  doesn’t make much of a point of his youth. While the perennial youthful topics of wine, love, and song make their appearances in this collection’s poems, there’s little if anything I can recall that makes explicit pleading that the author is of a new generation with new perceptions. The way Hughes did signal that was in the way he deals with the “song” part of that triumvirate: Jazz and Blues were still considered disreputable musics of little substance. The decade of the last Twenties may have been called “The Jazz Age,” but that then novel music was mostly the music to dance, drink, and swive to.

So, when Hughes claims right from the start that “The rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm” he’s making a fresh claim in 1926, that it’s not just some musical fad that’s passing through, a speeded-up frivolity. Even if white musicians and dancers were quick to latch onto the jaunty high-BPM rush of Jazz, Hughes is ready to claim that broken desires and pain were in there too.

Does he mean lovesick blues, or the Afro-American experience here when he makes that claim? Both I think. That’s a hella-reason why Afro-American forms pervade American music to this day: Americans as a whole have a long and strong dissatisfied streak. Plenty of musics sourced from around the world are good for dancing and signaling your erotic availability. Same for songs of utter sadness. But Afro-Americans figured out how to make sublime musics out of a combination of the oppressions and absurdities of life.

In his poem, Hughes twice makes the claim “The gods are laughing at us” — and despite the repetition of that line, he is ambiguous about what we should think of that. Are the gods the society that ignores, belittles, and oppresses? Or are the gods the wise eternals who know that we humans live short lives approaching half-knowledge, an absurdity that leaves laughing as wisdom?

I think at midnight — perhaps after some youthful partying that’s implied as preceding this poem — it’s a vibrating mixture of both. Overtones, undertones, Hughes says.

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Overtones, undertones….Jazz in Hughes’ 1926 was still thought of as a way to shake your groove thing.

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I often mention that my experience of the poems I use for texts here often changes in the process of making them into Parlando Project pieces. With this one, as I began to understand and express Hughes’ words I wanted to reply to the laughing gods in the original poem. So, I extended the original words with my own couplet: “Let them hear the laugh I return. / Let them understand the laugh I return.” Is that laugh and desire to the wise gods or the careless and oppressing system? Both. I’m far from 25, and that’s what I think reading and performing the young Hughes’ poem today.

Music in this piece is about as close as I can get to Jazz, though more of the Jazz of my youth than that of Hughes’ time. Yes, that fad was still going concern 40 years after Langston Hughes wrote his poem. I spent most of my time creating the piano part, which unlike a real pianist I have to compose by playing and selecting parts for each hand, but modern “virtual instruments” let me do stuff that Conlon Nancarrow had to hand-punch into player piano rolls to realize. I wanted a saxophone part too, but as I’ve already mentioned this winter, I can’t really get the articulations a good Jazz sax player relies on. My sax part sounded like an early student playing the most dismal society dance band number, and so I made the compromise I normally avoid and put in a short Gil Evans-ish horn section sample to enclose my sax part effectively.

You can hear Langston Hughes’ “Lenox Avenue: Midnight”  and my extension to it with the player gadget below, if you see one — or this highlighted link which will open a new tab to play it.

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*Lesser-known early 20th century Afro-American poet Anne Spencer made the same point eulogizing Paul Lawrence Dunbar with her short poem.

Sonny Rollins, The Bridge, 1959

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I’ve got reasons for kicking off Black History Month a few days early: my February is going to be appointment-filled, something that’s likely to reduce new work for this project, and I want to participate in this observance of American history.

Why was I so determined to do this? Well, note this project’s subtitle: “Where Music and Words Meet.” I’m an American composer, and American music is disproportionally Afro-American music. Yeah, it’s a big country, and many musicians with heritages from every continent*  have contributed, but if you compose or play American music, a lot of the notes are Black. So let’s get to today’s piece through three short, linked, tales.

The First Story:

Who’s this Sonny Rollins, and what bridge is he selling us back in the Fifties of all decades? It’s easy writing about poetry as I do here most often, to get used to a constrained fame; but I suspect more of the general Internet audience will know Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, or T. S. Eliot than know this man’s name and work. Mid 20th Century Americans, most often Black Americans, made a consolidated point of becoming masters of improvisation on the saxophone. Afterwards artistic accountants rank art and artists — and even if you think that’s wrong-headed, I’ll cite those who expend sincere effort in doing that and say that lists of great improvising saxophone players likely include Sonny Rollins.

But, just saying Rollins was good at it, a skilled musician, reduces him. For one thing, he had a dedication to the art of his craft, a need to expand the expression. So much so he famously spent a couple of years or so just dropping out of what was then still a viable commercial niche of jazz gigs and recording when he was considered to be one of the best and brightest on his instrument. To do what? To get better.

Insiders later learned some particulars of what he did. He went to a near deserted deck of a busy urban bridge and just played. And played. For months. For hours a day. In all kinds of weather. No, he wasn’t busking for spare change. Few noticed him. One of his records before this time was called Saxophone Colossus.  This wasn’t ironic as a title, or laughable, or a piece of hopeless self-promotion. Once likened to a metal giant who could stride rivers, Rollins on the bridge was small and alone and unnoticed, one man in a wind-gap of a city’s gusts. Practicing there he was no more than a flea on the back of a colossus.

After around two years of this, he figured he found some of his new/better. If you’re writing a screenplay you know how the final scene plays out. Our hero walks off the bridge and into a recording studio. A selection of ominous natterers remind us of the stakes in quick cuts: “Was he kicking drugs, or failing to kick? Is he washed up?” “You know folks like it sweet and tropical, he should try to play bossa nova.” The next voice says, “Funky jazz is the thing.” And another says, “How can you be even more free than ‘free jazz?”

And you know the next beat in your screenplay: he emerges with a record or a concert or both — and all of a sudden everyone realizes that he’s found it, something great, unique, ground-breaking, resplendent and recognized.

Wait, you don’t know who Sonny Rollins is — or maybe you do, but you know the person next to you on the Internet doesn’t. The record that Rollins did make was called The Bridge  in honor of the solitary workshopping he did over the East River. It was not a cultural event. Throw out your screenplay, the elevator doesn’t want your pitch. Even the experts then, the artistic accountants and grim critic-coroners were underwhelmed. Paging the Joseph Campbell who isn’t  an under-recognized Irish poet, this is The Hero’s Journey that ends with a shrug.**

The Second Story.

Back in my youth you paid for music ala carte. Every bit you could access at will was on a material disk you had to pay for. A person like myself with more time and adventure than money might scrounge. One thing I liked to do was to go into charity and second-hand shops and look for used records that attracted me. I can’t recall the exact cost of a new LP then, but I think it was around $3 to $4 or so. Records in these dingy shops might be a dime or 25 cents. Those within cardboard covers gave you extra material to judge if it was worth your widow’s mite — but at those places and time, the most forlorn records were just bare black disks scuffing against each other in a bin, and sometimes those got an additional price break. Whenever I recall those naked disks, I think of those who cleaned up after someone died or skipped rent and town, who just shoveled it all off to Goodwill or the Salvation Army in whatever, Warholian, cardboard boxes.

That’s where I found Sonny Rollins’ The Bridge.  I may have heard a bit about Rollins, how he was a particularly good improvisor because his improvisations had the logic of more considered compositions while retaining the flow of fresh idea after fresh idea.

Three things struck me about the record upon listening to it over and over and under its scratches and surface noise: that it mixed moods more than most jazz records. It wasn’t just a fast blowing session with a change of pace ballad or two, but that it was both angular and spare and hauntingly beautiful in both sorrow and joy.**  That the guitar player, Jim Hall, on the record didn’t sound like “jazz guitar” as I had heard it then.***  Instead, Hall added unusual harmonic colors that Rollins would then carve from. Eventually I realized something else unusual about the record as I compared it to more jazz records: there was no piano or other keyboard instrument. I eventually learned that this was something Rollins’ made a practice of. Yes, Hall was giving pieces some harmonic framework, and bass players in non free Jazz contexts are often asked to, and then, play “the changes” indicating the chords; but keyboard players, even if it’s not their session, often dominate the harmonic and rhythmic structure of a track. Here there was none of that.

Poetry in Gray. I know this is a long post, and I value your time, but here’s 30 minutes of the same group that recorded The Bridge playing live with a short interview with the 32 year old Rollins.

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The Third Story

I read this week an article by John Fordham in the Guardian  that reminded me that Sonny Rollins went into the studio to start recording The Bridge on January 30th in 1962 — so, 60 years ago. Fordham remarked on the legend of Rollins’ time on the Williamsburg Bridge along with a new interview he did with Rollins.

Unlike almost every one of his mid-century saxophone contemporaries, Rollins is still alive. He’s 91 years old now, and I last saw him play when he was around 80. Rollins was performing in a trio on that night with just bass and drums, and for about an hour he tore it up covering so much sonic space with his monophonic but powerful instrument. I marveled then, and now that I’m approaching his age at that gig, my amazement increases. Rollins developed lung disease and can no longer play, but he seems to have retained his composer as improvisor ability to see the patterns and connections.

This month I’ve been trying to build up a little strength and chops on guitar again. Nothing like Rollins’ multiple hours each day on a bridge level of woodshedding, but enough so that I can play that instrument that requires some physicality to realize its sounds.

In the midst of this, in the middle of the night, I awoke with some thoughts I had been growing about Rollins and the task of being an American and Afro-American artist. I wrote a complete first draft of today’s text in that middle night awaking. Not quite a Kubla Khan  dream, but still complete and formed enough to count today’s text as an improvisation. Wednesday, I came up with the song’s harmonic structure equally quickly. Yesterday I recorded it. Given that I’ve no access to other musicians — and I hardly make count-one-musician unless I beg the composer (who’s me, so I listen) to make things I can play — I had to play a track at a time. Today’s recording is a trio: drums and two guitar parts. I first recorded the chordal guitar part on a big archtop guitar (DeArmond X-155) along with the vocal. I’m no Jim Hall, but like Rollins’ The Bridge  I let that instrument set the harmonic framework. I confess (though listeners have already convicted me) I’m not good at Jazz comping, a key guitarist’s skill in that genre. I pardoned myself and proceeded. I then did the drums, trying very hard to get them to play off the guitar’s rhythm feel. And then finally as my studio-space time was coming to a close, I got to “blow” with guitar for the lead part.****  I did four passes, and the third was the best, and there you are. No, it doesn’t sound like The Bridge  LP, but then the point of The Bridge  wasn’t to sound like what went before either. The player gadget to hear it is below. No gadget? This highlighted hyperlink will also play it.

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*I must pedantically interrupt in footnote form to note that the continent of Antarctica has done little for American musical culture! It may be because our human species only visits there? One man, one guitarist at that, stands (sinks?) as the submariner of Antarctic-American guitar: Henry Kaiser. Here’s a 90 minute example.  Yes, that’s him playing guitar, and doing the under-ice diving too.

**Joy? “Without a Song. ” Sorrow? “God Bless the Child.”  Angular? The title cut’s cascade of heterodox melodic ideas. Or the stubborn “John S.”   I used to share a workspace with a 20-something guy who liked his progressive metal. He was perfectly tolerant of my King Crimson live tour ‘70s tapes. But the opening riff of “Jon S.”  would drive him right around the bend to a burlesqued old-person-like rant about “take off that noise.”

***Jazz guitar at that time was represented to me by John McLaughlin in his Mahavishnu Orchestra years and others exploring that bag. Those guitarists were loud and very in your melted-face with their expression. Even quieter, older generation jazz guitarists often played more notes in one song than Jim Hall played on the entire The Bridge  LP. Magazines would have “best of” polls back then for musicians, and I’d always vote for Jim Hall, who’d end up in the fine print of “those also receiving votes.” Then strangely enough as the 20th century started to end, Jim Hall became the model for a number of other guitarists who came up later, for example: Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell.

The Bridge itself has come to be recognized as more vital in retrospect. Oh, not necessarily to the raters who will need to get numbers down for Kind of Blue, A Love Supreme, The Shape of Jazz to Come  first, but to those who seek to learn new pleasures listening to music whose time has passed but whose timelessness remains. You may not like all of it if you just taste test it. Looking today, about eight times more Spotify listeners pleasantly listen to “God Bless the Child”  than dig “John S.”   By the way, the version on Spotify seems to be remastered, and to my memory Jim Hall’s parts are mixed up higher than they were in my vinyl memories.

****Should it have been saxophone? Yes, but I have a hard time wrangling any of my saxophone MIDI virtual instruments to get good expression, and Rollins is a master of saxophone expression. I stuck with my primary instrument for the lead instead. By the way, it’s the same jumbo DeArmond archtop that chopped the chords, but my little combo amp is turned up.

The Folly of Being Comforted

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Readers often hear different poems when reading the same text. It’s unavoidable, even though it causes some authors to despair at how they are misread. So, it should be no surprise that it is possible in performance to recast poetry considerably without changing a word.

Around 1902 Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote a poem taking exception to a too-easy consolation meant to comfort. He cared for the poem enough that around 20 years later he revised it slightly, to emphasize his response to this well-meaning gesture, explicitly writing out the one word concise enough to underline his feelings at the offer of comfort: “No.”

Those who study Yeats’ life are pretty sure this poem is biographical and is based on his unrequited courtship of Maude Gonne. That’s a long story, and to say that these were two complicated individuals is to understate the matter. If one reads today’s text, that poem “The Folly of Being Comforted,”  in that biographical way, it makes sense. Here’s a link to that text.  That reading, coldly condensed, would have it that someone told Yeats, “Hey, that hottie that you are so enamored with — I’ve heard she’s getting older, grey hair, older skin around her eyes. Sure, they say with age comes wisdom, but never mind any of that, she’s no longer so attractive that others will be chasing her. So now, maybe your chance will come around.” And to this Yeats gives his “No,” explaining that as he sees it, she’s not lost a step beauty and attractiveness-wise.

There’s a perfectly good romantic love sonnet there, and that’s not what I performed today.

I’m mentioned this year that I have family and others I know going through infirmities and transitions. It’s not my nature to talk about them, or even to directly write of my own experience of those situations. Even though one of the principles of this project has been to seek out and to present “Other People’s Stories,” I’m hesitant to speak over their own voices*  in the same way that I’m comfortable talking about those long dead and in some cases too little remembered.

As I was working today on finishing the mix of the audio performance you can hear below, Dave called me to tell me that our friend and poet Kevin FitzPatrick had died last night. We were planning to visit him in hospice tomorrow. Now we’ll visit him when we think of him. Visiting hours are now unlimited.

Kevin FitzPatrick and Ethna McKiernan

For many years Kevin and Ethna would celebrate poetry in a public reading on St. Patrick’s Day in Minnesota.

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Another poet we both know, Ethna McKiernan, is also facing a serious illness this year. When I read and then performed Yeats’ poem, I was thinking of these things. I recognized it was a romantic love poem, yes, but I read all sorts of undertones in it. We are meant to pass over them in the “correct” reading. Maude Gonne was all of 35 when Yeats first published his poem, the grey hair and “shadows…about her eyes” were likely subtle things. We’re all more than double that. Age is not subtle at that volume. When I read Yeats’ simple elaborating line “I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.” I felt my own lack of useful care or comfort I’ve offered Kevin or Ethna, partly because I fear I’d be rather bad at it, and partly because I’m less close to either of them than even Dave is. That said I’ve been acquainted with Ethna for about 40 years. I may have not been close to her in her “wild summer,” but I knew her when. Yes, the fire “burns more clearly” with her even now as Yeats says.  After all, when you get our age, there’s more fuel.

Yeats called his poem, “The Folly of Being Comforted”  and he ended the poem with that title. He likely had real feelings in this matter, long ago when he was alive. When I think of these mortal matters, now, here, my feelings are different than a witty sonnet about someone’s crude mistake regarding his estimate of Maude Gonne. And so I performed my feelings, using Yeats words.

The player to hear that performance is below for many of you, but some ways of reading this won’t display that. So, I also offer this highlighted hyperlink that will open a new tab window and play it.

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*I feel I must guard myself in that partly because I’d easily fall into it if I didn’t.

Hortensia

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

This has not been a month conducive to producing new content for this project, and I’m not sure about July and August either. At some point I’ll probably talk about some of the reasons for that, but I thought it’d be good to leave you with one more June piece, and it’s a fine summer song by a voice this project hasn’t heard from enough lately: Dave Moore.

Dave and I first performed as The LYL Band about 40 years ago, and we’ve kept at it over the years. Our typical encounters this century have been a sort of two-person song circle with each of us alternating in presenting a song, a piece most often completely new and unknown to the other. These first takes* get recorded, and one of them is today’s audio piece.

First takes with unknown material is not the way most bands work, and certainly not how they record. Bob Dylan worked with unknown, fresh material and new-to-it musicians in his classic years (and may still now, there’s just less documentation), often providing at best chord charts for assembled musicians or brief run-throughs. But Dylan would do multiple takes even trying different studios or musicians over time, trying get the right take.

It’s not uncommon for jazz musicians to do the same thing we do in their recording studio dates, though some feel that even with Jazz’s reverence for spontaneity that this is a practice brought forward for logistical and lowered recording-budget overhead reasons, not as a considered artistic choice. Miles Davis seemed to find this practice a considered choice though, and when one listens to a record such as Kind of Blue  we are likely to give some credit to that choice, which Bill Evans likened to spontaneous Japanese painting in the original LP liner notes. Later on, Davis took to the pentimento-practice of having everyone improvising on themes and then letting later audio editing assemble from the mass of recorded playing a post-recording compositional structure. A record like Davis’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson  assembled that way has a different vibe and timbre from Kind of Blue,  but it works for me in its different way.

Are Dave and I musicians like Davis and his band members? No. Nor are we musicians likely to be called to a Bob Dylan session (note to Bob: call us anyway). Most of what we record on any one day isn’t worth more than a self-critical listen on our own parts. And of the rest? There are usually rough spots that even a bit of focused audio editing can’t excise. And then, sometimes something like “Hortensia”  arrives.

If you accept (as I say often here) that all artists fail, then it can sometimes behoove one to make peace with failure. Do that, and then allow, then make possible, for the limited successes to arrive.

I often tend to overstate my guitar parts. I didn’t here. Dave’s keyboard skills at the time of the recording get some space, and while he’s not going to kick Bill Evans or Herbie Hancock to the curb, what he plays works. Dave’s vocals are usually more consistent than mine by a long shot, and his performance serves the song. I think Dave may have even improvised some of these lyrics during the performance — and this is the only performance of this song ever.  And that serves the song too.

You see, I hear this as a summer song, a song of long days, rich days, that are still days,  and must end in earth’s and fortune’s rota. “Now, sweet now” Dave sings. Yes.

Hortensia

I think I asked Dave what the song was about shortly after we recorded it. “The summer flower or the Roman woman?” I think he replied that it was more at something intuitive.

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You can hear it with the player gadget below. Don’t see a player? This highlighted hyperlink will also play it. “Hortensia” is longer than most of our pieces here, but sit back with a cool drink and listen. Thank you hearty listeners and readers for sticking with this project!

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*First, and in most cases, the only take. Since we haven’t focused on live performance much in our old age, we aren’t working up material for performance or developing a repertoire for that. Dave has been as prolific with words and with songs with his own music as I have been with musical pieces over the past few years. This means that there was always new material to be tried out, to be brought into existence, even if briefly and for one take.